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Why VO2 max is the greatest predictor of lifespan | Dan's journey back to health and fitness (Pt. 2)
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- Authors
- Global Cycling Network
- Duration
- 16:00
- Published
- May 4 2024
As a counter-take, here's an article from The Ringer on why chasing vo2max is mostly misguided: https://www.theringer.com/2024/4/19/24134772/health-fads-and-fictions-vo2-max-supplement-mania-sunlight-and-immortality#:~:text=But%20anyways%2C%20what%20is%20VO2,and%20that's%20what%20it%20is.
That doesn't really seem to provide much of a counterpoint though. The first argument is that it's not the only thing that matters for elites. Of course, but it's the most important factor that got them there; it's the thing that they couldn't have ever been elite without. Saying that VO2max isn't the only thing doesn't mean that it's not the most important thing.
The second argument is that those tests that were used to correlate VO2max with longevity were not actually measuring VO2max. That also seems like a strange, nitpicky argument to make because the test measures something that correlates very highly with VO2max and something that cannot be achieved without your specific VO2max. It seems silly to think that longevity correlates more with your neuromuscular ability to make yourself go a certain speed than the most important underlying characteristic that gets you to the point where you can maintain that speed.
It feels contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
That's kind of missing the point. The point is that Vo2max is not the "ultimate" or "greatest" metric for anything.
What everything we know about health and lifespan points to is: exercise. You need to exercise. There is no reason to believe vo2max is particularly important other than as a metric that for the most part correlates with fitness. We have no studies that show that someone who, say, is in the top 30th percentile for running 5ks but has comparatively poor vo2max is more likely to die.
That's what the point in bringing up those studies were; they weren't even trying to show correlation with vo2max. You can just as easily use them to show that intensity of exercise, which is what they were measuring, is the best indicator of longevity.
So why not hold yourself to vo2max? There's nothing wrong with keeping it in the mix, but there's two things. One is that vo2max is not trivial to measure. To actually have a lab accurate vo2max measurement, you need to have a real, lab grade blood oximeter and be exercising at your physical limit. No one does that; they just use what their apple watch or garmin says their vo2max is, which is really calibrating yourself against a random number generator.
Secondly, it can get people to hyper fixate when, again, what really matters is that they exercise vigorously with progressively intensity. You can just google "reddit vo2max plateau" to see this in action. No, there's no reason to do whack-a-doodle HIT exercises instead of what you were doing just because garmin says your vo2max hasn't gone up this month. There's certainly no reason to believe that you should replace strength training with "vo2max training" for the sake of longevity.
Instead, what matters is the intensity of the exercise you're doing. There's always an easier way to measure this. If you're a runner, measure how fast you're running a mile or a 3k. Make sure you keep pushing yourself. You don't have to get yourself in a lab to get a vo2max reading. It doesn't matter that much. If you keep running faster and faster, or lifting heavier and heavier, or rowing faster, you're doing good.
Just exercise!
Your first sentence doesn't seem to fully fit with the rest of what you said. VO2max can still be the best metric without there being a need to actually measure it consistently. You're also ignoring one of the main things that VO2max actually measures: your weight. The easiest way to increase your VO2 max is not to work out; it's to lose weight. In that way, VO2max is largely just a synthesis of the two biggest components that go into your health: your weight and your fitness. That is why VO2max is so great. It's like in baseball with your batting average and your walks. It's great to have a high batting average and it's great to have a lot of walks, but when you combine them into on-base percentage, you get an actually useful statistic that can actually be used to predict your ability to produce runs.
That's exactly where things go wrong; this is not science, it's conjecture. We don't have studies with that granularity of correlation, let alone causation. Is 1 ml/kg/min from weight loss better or worse for your lifespan than 1 ml/kg/min from HIIT? Who knows!
There's a really easy way to see if your weight is a problem: it's a scale. Most people have them. You can get one for 10 bucks. They're as perfectly accurate as someone could want.
Here's the rub: if you're a layperson, who just wants to be fit and live a long life, there is zero reason to measure your vo2max. Exercise regularly, push yourself, eat healthily. That's what we know reliably correlates with lifespan. There's no reason to reach for magic numbers.
There is zero science that shows that someone who vigorously exercises but whose vo2max is low is at some kind of risk. The predictive value of vo2max so far has been that it is correlative with fitness.
If you are an elite athlete, as we established, it is no longer predictive of performance. So you also don't need to measure vo2max. And, either way, at that point you have personal trainers to give you personalized plans.
It's not like reading your vo2max is opening a pandora's box. It's fine. It just has little value over all the other metrics of your fitness which are readily available, so there's no reason to go out of your way.
I feel like you aren't really responding to what I'm actually saying and that you are making up situations that don't really exist. Someone who exercises vigorously but still has a low VO2max either has something wrong with their body that prevents physiological adaptations or they are obese. Similarly, you aren't going to be good at the 5K if you don't have a decent VO2max. So of course there isn't going to be science that says these people are in trouble because these people largely don't exist.
Also the section that you quoted absolutely is science and I never said whether increasing your VO2max through weight loss or through exercise is better--I just said that the easiest way to increase your VO2max is to lose weight and obviously being at a healthy weight is associated with longer lifespans.
It really feels like you're jumping through a lot of Hoops to disprove that VO2max is a good indicator of longevity. You literally cannot maintain intense exercise without a decent vo2max, so the intensity of the exercise maintained must logically be a valid proxy for VO2max. That doesn't mean that there aren't people with a high VO2max who have a bad "intensity score," but it does mean that there are no people with a bad VO2max who have a high "intensity score"--that would be physically impossible. Plus, no idea why you keep bringing up elites. They have nothing to do with this. Neither does going and actually taking a VO2max test. You can have a high VO2max without ever taking a test.
The fact of the matter is that VO2max is a practical synthesis of two fundamental factors that play a role in your longevity. Having a good VO2max correlate with greater longevity regardless of if an individual gets their VO2max tested or trains specifically for their VO2max.
I'll leave it at this, because we're quite literally talking in circles, but you aren't addressing anything I'm saying.
Like if this is what you're getting from it, you're not reading correctly. I put this sentence at the end because it is the distillation of what I'm saying
Vo2max can be an indicator of your health; it's just doing so by being a proxy of a bunch of things that are really easy to measure. So why bother.
The only reason why you would want to independently record your vo2max is if it were possible that you could exercise and be of a healthy weight and still have bad vo2max and have that be detrimental. As you stated, that's not really possible.
So again, there's no point in measuring or benchmarking yourself against vo2max. You're just trying to find a number that tangentially correlated with the actual things that matter, which you can measure really easily, like the intensity of your workouts.
If you exercise frequently and vigorously (and progressively more intense), and are of a healthy weight, there is no case where measuring your vo2max will do anything at all. And the former can be found with technologies like: a stopwatch. Or a scale.
I can't believe you said that I was not reading your comment properly when most of your comment was about how pointless it is to measure VO2max even though I have never said that you should get your VO2 max measured and, indeed, have implied otherwise. So I guess you're right that the discussion is over.
Don't we? I would swear I read something like that... but I cannot find it. And my memory is shit, so I am likely wrong. However, I would not be surprised at all. I am not disputing that exercise helps. But VO2max, although trainable to a certain degree, has a pretty big genetic component. There are people with relatively low VO2max who exercise and there are the lucky bastards with high VO2max who do not bother. Are you sure the first group is, on average, going to outlive the second? I am not. Honestly, if I had to bet, I would bet on the second group.
The US Air Force used to use this as a standard of health. They stopped a long time ago.
That's because the Air Force did it in the stupidest possible way with elite athletes failing the test, and people literally smoking a cigarette before taking the test as a way to make it more likely that they would pass.
Edit: typos
For any of you running 5Ks, VO2max is also the greatest factor in success in 5Ks ;)
Sort of! If you take a guy with a good VO2max and a guy with a bad VO2max, the correlation is very strong. But if you take two guys with really good VO2max, it starts to become much less predictive of who's going to win.
Yeah, I had "predictor" originally, but then changed it to factor in success" for that reason. It might not quite win your 5K for you, but it will get you to the level where you are competitive. Basically, if you have two identical people who run let's say...five days a week, one of whom trains their lactate threshold once a week while the other trains their VO2max, the one who did the VO2max sessions will likely win (ignoring the fact that Lactate Threshold and VO2max training sessions often overlap).
😂